The main objective of this project is to test a general etiological model of the onset of smoking in children, with special reference to the formative impact of the pre-teen years. An ancillary objective is to assess the usefulness of certain health education components in an intervention strategy aimed at "innoculating" youngsters psychologically against smoking onset. The research is based upon a secondary analysis of data collected for an earlier health education project focused on the prevention of alcohol use and abuse in children, but the data set includes a specific measure of cigarette smoking quantity and frequency. Longitudinal data across a 3-year period have already been collected from school children as part of the evaluation of the health education project. Data contain measures of self-esteem; coping and decision-making skills; self-reported measures of smoking and other drug use; psychosocial measures, derived from the literature of sociology and psychology, including age, sex, race, religious involvement, parental control and support, peer control and support, and various measures of happiness or satisfaction, and of "stakes in conformity" or conventional behavior. Methodology will take maximum advantage of the rich longitudinal data by applying various techniques of causal modeling. The long-term significance of the proposed work would seem to lie in its findings about the developmental process of the onset of smoking in children, and the prospects for intervention therein.